Openminds.tv » Sean Casteelhttp://www.openminds.tv
Exploring UFOs and Extraterrestrial LifeTue, 31 Mar 2015 16:10:39 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1The Close Encounter Research Organization Goes Internationalhttp://www.openminds.tv/the-close-encounter-research-organization-goes-international/18383
http://www.openminds.tv/the-close-encounter-research-organization-goes-international/18383#commentsWed, 23 Jan 2013 19:34:48 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=18383What began as a support group strictly for alien abductees has recently created an international group open to the general public in addition to abductees. The Close Encounter Research Organization (CERO) International held its inaugural meeting on January 12, 2013, in Thousand Oaks, California.

]]>**This is a guest post by Sean Casteel and John Weigle. The ideas, statements, and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Open Minds.**

What began as a support group strictly for alien abductees has recently created an international group open to the general public in addition to abductees. The Close Encounter Research Organization (CERO) International held its inaugural meeting on January 12, 2013, in Thousand Oaks, California, located north of Los Angeles in Ventura County.

CERO was founded in 1991 by Certified Hypnotherapist Yvonne Smith and began to hold monthly support group meetings “as a resource and safe haven for experiencers of alien abductions or close encounters,” according to a press release issued by Smith.

CERO founder Yvonne Smith. (Credit: Sean Casteel)

The newly formed international group seeks to branch out from its Southern California roots and by expanding nationally and internationally hopes to gather information and provide support along with cutting-edge worldwide UFO presentations and news. CERO International intends to host presentations by experiencers and researchers of international renown and to step outside the cloister of abductees to educate the general public about the reality of the UFO phenomenon and the trauma to which experiencers may be subjected.

At the first public meeting of CERO International, the guest speaker was abductee Travis Walton, whose case was famously, if at times inaccurately, portrayed in the 1993 Hollywood production Fire in the Sky. The meeting opened with a showing of a program from the SyFy Channel called Paranormal Witness in which the Travis Walton story was told in documentary form. The show was not shown in its entirety due to technical problems with the DVD, but it still helped to lay the groundwork for Walton’s appearance. The program quotes Walton as saying, “If you’re going to judge this, take a look at the facts. The facts speak for themselves.”

The story of the UFO event, which took place in November of 1975, began when Walton and six other members of a tree-cutting crew had finished their day’s work in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest and were returning home. They “caught sight of a glow through the trees,” according to Walton. The crew began to discard possible reasons for it, ruling out the moon, which was clearly visible elsewhere in the sky, as well as the possibility of a forest fire or plane crash. The object was “a clearly defined, metallic object” hovering approximately one hundred feet away.

“It was terrifying, but it was beautiful,” Walton told the documentary filmmakers.

Walton chose to leave the truck carrying the crew home and approached the hovering ship. A beam of light from the UFO stuck him and lifted him up in the air. On seeing that, the rest of the crew decided to flee. They soon gathered enough courage to return and see if Walton was okay, but he had disappeared completely. Walton’s co-workers hesitated to notify law enforcement because they knew that suspicion would fall on them as killers if they told what would seem like a crazy flying saucer story to explain Walton’s disappearance. Walton was returned by the abductor UFO five days later, basically unharmed but of course very shaken by what had happened.

Travis Walton. (Credit: Sean Casteel)

Walton was accompanied at the CERO International meeting by two members of the crew who were with him the night of the 1975 UFO incident: John Goulette and Steve Pierce.

Walton said he and his workmates had been close enough to the hovering ship that they could have tossed a rock at it and struck it. He feels it was his own choice to leave the truck and approach the ship, as opposed to the aliens somehow forcing him to do so. Steve Pierce added that there was a big pile of logging debris at the site, so Walton couldn’t move closer without difficulty.

“It seemed like something was about to happen,” Walton recounted.

He could feel some kind of force field was building up. When he tried to run back to the truck, “that’s when the energy hit me.” It knocked him unconscious, he said, adding that, “It was so intense that it was like an explosion, like I’d stepped on dynamite or something.”

John Goulette interjected that he didn’t see the beam hit Walton, but he did see its effect on Walton, while Steve Pierce recalled that for the next five days, they assumed Walton was dead. They called the sheriff in the nearby town of Heber, Arizona, who began a search of the area. Goulette said that he had seen combat in Viet Nam and was involved in street fights as a youth but he had “never been so scared in all my life.”

According to Pierce, after a preliminary search, the sheriff decided that crew chief Mike Rogers and two others had to revisit the site of the incident while the rest were permitted to go home. He said it didn’t really begin to sink in until the next day when a policeman arrived and said they were confident Walton was dead and they were now searching for his body. Law enforcement also separated the six men into smaller groups trying to wheedle a confession out of them. Walton’s brothers as well as the local community were also suspicious.

Pierce was living in seclusion with his girlfriend when the police approached him and said they were aware of his innocence but that if he was concealing someone else’s guilt he was just as liable for charges of murder.

Meanwhile, onboard the alien ship, Walton awakened “in a lot of pain. I couldn’t breathe.”
Walton found himself on a round surface, saw light around him and heard sounds. He had something across his chest and his eyes went in and out of focus. He also had double vision. There was a form standing nearby that he thought was a doctor but turned out to be an alien.

“I knew where I was,” Walton said, “and I knew I was in serious trouble.”

He rose from the table and felt around for some object to defend himself with. He grabbed something off the table and started swinging at some gray alien-like beings. The beings stepped out of range of his improvised weapon and stared at Walton.

“Their eyes were just drilling into me,” Walton said, in what he believes was an effort to control him.

“Without their ability to control me, I was the big bull in the china shop.”

At that point, the aliens left the room, going right. Walton went left.

“I was just totally out of my mind with fear,” he said.

He came to a room with a chair in it and entered. He planned to find a door and jump out to the ground, but he thinks now that the ship was most likely no longer in the forest. He noticed there were buttons on the chair but they didn’t seem to do anything. There was a screen on the chair that showed angles and segments, but not recognizable numbers and letters.

Next entered a person Walton felt was from Earth. He looked human and was wearing a helmet. The human-looking entity escorted Walton to a passageway, then through an airlock and down a ramp.

“He seemed to be in a real hurry,” Walton said.

Walton could see other disc-shaped craft in a large room they passed through, but they were shinier and rounder than the craft in the forest. The man in the helmet sat Walton down in a chair with other human-looking entities present. They refused to answer any of Walton’s questions. He grabbed something from a table in order to struggle against them, but the entities simply looked at him impassively, with “a little bit of a lack of expression.”

Shortly thereafter, Walton discovered himself to be on a stretch of road above Heber, Arizona, that he was familiar with. He went to a pay phone and made a collect call to his brother, who would prove to be very supportive in the aftermath of Walton’s experience. Walton says that next he must have passed out in the phone booth before he was able to tell his brother what had happened.

Suspicion continued to cast a cloud over Walton’s workmates, however. Over the second and third days after Walton’s disappearance, law enforcement officials asked the crew to take lie detector tests.

“I just knew we were going to prison for murder,” Pierce said. “If we would have failed that polygraph test we never would have left that jail.”

In the days before Walton returned, the group was also hounded by the news media, which Pierce said he took great pains to avoid.

The Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), at the time a thriving UFO research group, located Walton and his co-workers and wanted to have medical tests administered, while another unnamed group said the experience was the result of drug-induced hallucinations.

For his part, Walton said he was psychologically traumatized. At the CERO International meeting he said the UFO event was “dead serious to us,” and “the most powerful event of our lives.”

Walton also offered his theory that lots of beings are being grouped under the general idea of “grays,” but that he is not convinced they all come from the same place. Later he said he has the same belief about the human-looking aliens seen by him and others.

“There may be others that look similar,” Walton said, “but that have a different agenda.”

Therefore, to assume they’re all from one place is probably wrong, he said. Walton also said that despite the grays’ diminutive stature (they were “very small”), when you look into their eyes you get a feeling that’s hard to explain. It’s easily possible that they could be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us, but that no one, including the government, really knows.

The meeting then opened for questions from the audience.

Steve Pierce and John Goulette. (Credit: Sean Casteel)

In response to the question, “How do you feel now?” Steve Pierce answered by saying that his two brothers still don’t believe his story. Before their recent reunion to talk publicly about the incident, he had not seen Walton for 30-plus years. Pierce also said that the late Philip Klass, an extremely vocal debunker of UFO phenomena, repeatedly called Pierce, offering him $10,000 if he’d say it was all a hoax. Pierce told his wife that he was going to take the money – since no one believed his story anyway – but she said that if he believed in his story he shouldn’t sell himself out for the money. Klass continued to hound Pierce and his family for years.

According to Walton, some Klass supporters say that Pierce fabricated the story, but it was included in the first edition of Walton’s book “Fire In The Sky” and Klass never contested it. After Klass died, a Freedom of Information Act request for information about him resulted in “some very interesting stuff.” Walton displayed some of the material gleaned from Klass’s files on the screen, which included statements by the FBI that Klass seemed to behave erratically and to be unnecessarily argumentative. Klass also made a wasted effort to sully the integrity of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek (the head scientist for the Air Force’s Project Blue Book who later openly affirmed the reality of UFOs) whose record remained clean in spite of Klass. The writer of the FBI document recommended that the bureau approach any further dealings with Klass very cautiously.

An audience member asked Walton how long he’d been aboard the alien ship, and he replied that he had been conscious part of the time and unconscious part of the time, but when he was found at the service station he had five days growth of beard. He thought it was still that same night when his brother came for him. Looking back, it seemed to be about five days and six hours.

Another question: Don’t you think there’s a need for a group like AA for people who have had such experiences?

Walton answered that that is what CERO is. There are claims that are quite legitimate and some that aren’t, he added, but we have to think of how far we’ve come. When this happened to him, there was no proof of planets outside our solar system. Today space flight is more routine, and there are many science fiction movies about aliens coming to Earth.

“The idea of ‘we are not alone’ has come a long way,” Walton said, and Goulette echoed that by saying he felt there was less ridicule about it these days.

Still, none of the men have felt an obsessive need to study the UFO phenomenon. People would tell Walton various stories, but he doesn’t keep any files on the subject since he is busy enough with his own day-to-day existence.

“I know what happened to me,” Walton said, “but I don’t know anything about any other cases.”

When asked whether any of them had profited from the experience, Pierce and Goulette both said they have received nothing from the makers of the “Fire In The Sky” movie but that people have paid their expenses to enable them to attend meetings like the CERO International event. Walton noted that the crew had lost money on the forestry contract they were engaged in when the incident happened and found it difficult to get work as loggers in the aftermath.

Details in the movie were changed for commercial reasons, Walton said, and people say they wish there was a movie that told the real story. Maybe someday. There’s a scene in the movie about a homecoming party that never happened, but Walton said you’d be amazed at the number of people in the Snowflake area who say today that they went to it.

“I’m in one of those phases,” Walton said. “I’m just trying to set the record straight.”

The question was posed to Walton, had he had any other experiences?

He said that when the filming for the movie started he had dreams but was never sure if he was recalling real events or just remembering things that had been previously talked about. Most of the dreams were mere glimpses, but he could not affirm that anything of them had really happened.

Was there anything spiritual attached to the craft or beings?

Goulette answered that it was technical, not spiritual, while Pierce confessed that at first he thought it was the devil and that the world was ending. For Walton, there was much that was beautiful and fearful but that no spiritual interpretation was needed.

“This is nuts and bolts,” he said, adding that some say it’s devils and some say angels.

Travis Walton and Yvonne Smith. (Credit: Sean Casteel)

Before the Q and A with the audience, CERO founder Yvonne Smith took the microphone, announcing that this was the inaugural meeting of CERO International, which is open to those who have not had UFO experiences as well as those who have. The goal of the group is to “reach out to the masses and mainstream media and to keep our heads on the chopping block” in order to get the information out.

Meetings will be held every other month. The March 9 meeting will feature Dr. Barry E. Taff, author of “Aliens Above, Ghosts Below,” and will be held at the Palm Garden Hotel in Thousand Oaks, California.

The January 12 meeting was dedicated to Bill Leavy, who died January 25, 2012, and had wanted to do another UFO conference as successful as the one he hosted in Santa Maria in August of 2008 (called the Central Coast Science-UFO Symposium), along with his wife Alice Leavy, who is currently the vice president for CERO International. Alice heard Bill say as the meeting was being planned, “Go big or go home.”

In his opening remarks, Dr. Roger Leir (the Southern California podiatrist who has surgically removed alien implants from at least a dozen abductees and who now serves as the research and news director for CERO International) declared that other UFO research groups had come and gone, and said that the still-extant Mutual UFO Network is no longer interested in abductions or crop circles or anything except sightings reports. Therefore, “We’re going to be the new organization.” CERO International intends to have a director in every country in the world to gather and distribute information.

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/the-close-encounter-research-organization-goes-international/18383/feed0When Black Friday comes: Waiting for too much of nothinghttp://www.openminds.tv/when-black-friday-comes-waiting-for-too-much-of-nothing/17650
http://www.openminds.tv/when-black-friday-comes-waiting-for-too-much-of-nothing/17650#commentsFri, 16 Nov 2012 15:26:10 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=17650There is currently a great deal of anticipation and speculation regarding the coming date of December 21, 2012, said to be the final day of the current world age according to the ancient Mayan calendar.

]]>**This is a guest post by Sean Casteel. The ideas, statements, and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Open Minds.**

It would be an understatement to say that there is currently a great deal of anticipation and speculation regarding the coming date of December 21, 2012, said to be the final day of the current world age according to the ancient Mayan calendar. One of the original proponents of this idea was the late scholar and author Jose Arguelles, who had long championed the notion that the Mayans understood the true nature of time much better than those of us governed by the Gregorian calendar and the inadequate, linear passing of our days.

Cover of Stephanie South’s book. (Credit: New Page Books)

Arguelles was the subject of a biography called 2012: Biography of a Time Traveler, The Journey of Jose Arguelles, written by a journalist named Stephanie South. South was also a follower of Arguelles and claimed to have first meant her mentor in a dream state where he showed her the principles of traveling in time using telepathy.

Along with explaining some of Arguelles’ often quite complex theories about time, the extraterrestrials and the countdown to 2012, South admittedly also presents a scathingly honest, warts-and-all portrait of Arguelles, never flinching from discussing the alcoholism, the broken marriages and long bouts of depression that troubled Arguelles even as he moved toward his own kind of personal enlightenment.

Arguelles was well known for spearheading the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, one of those pivotal events in the history of the New Age movement. The reasoning and calculations by which the dates for that watershed moment were arrived at are complicated and also refer back to the Mayan calendar.

“The dates for the Harmonic Convergence,” South told me in a 2009 interview, “were given to Jose in the early 1970s by Lakota author and poet Tony Shearer, as the conclusion of the prophecy of the thirteen heavens and the nine hells. The heaven and hell cycles refer to a sequence of 52-year cycles that began in the year AD 843.”

The heavenly cycles are ominously said to be periods of “decreasing choice,” while the hell cycles of “increasing doom” began when Cortes landed in Mexico in 1519. When translated in to our own calendar system, the relevant days for the ending of the hell cycles were August 16 and 17 of 1987.

Jose Arguelles

There were those who felt the Harmonic Convergence of 1987 was a success, but for Arguelles it was merely a dress rehearsal for a bigger type of event – the Harmonic Convergence of 2012. And what should we expect to see when the long awaited date comes in a matter of weeks?

“Of course,” South told me, “no one knows for certain precisely what will occur. As you know, there are so many theories out there. But my feeling is, whatever it is, it is already happening now. That we are part of some grand time-release program, that we are mutating or becoming something else. I think it is important that we not project our conditioned conceptions too much on that which is to come, but be open for anything. According to Jose, this date marks a kind of frequency shift. He perceives a type of intervention, extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional.”

Arguelles wrote more about his beliefs in a 2006 article called “Galactic Culture and Cosmic Civilization.”

“The present global crisis,” Arguelles wrote, “is being guided or observed by a divine hierarchical intelligence operating inter-dimensionally and perhaps also extraterrestrially. As awful as they may be, current events are both the consequence of historical karmic effects and at the same time they are being orchestrated, as it were, for purposes of a divine or supra-mental descent. This intervention is needed because, by its current operating standards and steadily lowering rate of consciousness, humanity could never otherwise get out of its irrevocable slide into total global catastrophe.”

Arguelles believed he was in telepathic contact with the same benevolent ET forces he describes above and filled many notebooks with communications from the ETs, which included numerous mathematical computations from beyond.

His fervent belief in some kind of last minute rescue by extraterrestrials is of course nothing new. UFO contactees have been receiving and relaying much the same kind of message since the 1950s. Arguelles adds to the mix a complex mathematical interpretation of the Mayan calendar, which works on a base 20 system as opposed to our base 10 system. The Mayans were said to be employing a more highly evolved way to crunch the numbers that also maps out the synchronic order of things – a way to decode the past, present and future through numbers that “live and speak.” Or so Arguelles was told by the “Galactic Maya,” his term for the ETs who communicated with him.

“People have to realize,” South said, “that we are going into a new state of being and reality. Individual consciousness has to be moved to the wayside so that we can come together as a group planetary consciousness. This is what is being called for in the cosmic evolution.”

One aspect of this collective transformation will include Earth becoming a completely telepathic world. The question was then asked, why is that necessarily a good thing? Who would want their inner, private thoughts exposed, even for the sake of cosmic evolution?

South replied by asking another question.

“What is a private thought?” she asked. “Do aliens have private thoughts? If you have genuine goodwill for all, then what is a private thought? Humans think the world revolves around them and their thoughts. But it doesn’t. There is a much larger plan, higher intelligent forces. The way Jose describes it, we evolve through telepathic attunement. As the collective becomes the individual, the individual becomes the collective. Meaning no one is interfering with your personal growth, but we are all growing together as a single planetary organism.

“The clearer the mind,” South continued, “the better it is able to be in telepathic rapport with what we might term ‘alien.’ Of course, those operating on lower vibrational frequencies can also attract aliens, but oftentimes those are perceived as darker forces. Our minds are very powerful, and we have not yet even begun to tap the incredible potential.”

Given that Arguelles not only helped to originate the current school of thought about something world-shattering and cosmic happening on December 21, 2012, it is a sad irony that he died before seeing any of it come to fruition. Arguelles passed away on March 23, 2011, from peritonitis, at his retreat in central Australia.

The obituary that appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 10 quoted one academic as saying he felt Arguelles’ understanding of Mayan cosmology was seriously flawed.

“Although I have spent years studying Mesoamerican calendars,” said Colgate University professor and Maya expert Anthony Aveni, “I must confess that I cannot understand even one of Arguelles’ complicated-looking diagrams. Nor can I follow his explanation, which is punctuated with scientific jargon incomprehensible even to scientists.”

Arguelles obviously had problems communicating with an academic, scientific audience. Nevertheless, his beliefs have become deeply ingrained for a massive amount of people. According to John Michael Greer, the author of “Apocalypse Not,” Arguelles’ 2012 concept has become the most fashionable “apocalypse meme.”

Cover of John Michael Greer’s book. (Credit: Viva Editions)

What is a meme, you may ask? The word has entered more and more into the mainstream, but a little explanation may be still be helpful.

According to Greer, “Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term, in his 1976 book, ‘The Selfish Gene,’ as a label for ideas that replicate through human society the way that genes replicate through a population of living things.”

A meme is an idea or set of ideas, Greer continues, “that can be transmitted from one person to another. It survives as long as it remains a factor in somebody’s thoughts and actions, and it spreads when one person convinces another to accept the meme. Unlike many other memes, the apocalypse meme can be traced throughout history all the way back to its origins between 1500 and 1200 BCE, and it can be followed forward from that point right up to the present.”

It is certainly the case that Arguelles’ ideas proceeded outward from his initial inspiration and took on a life of their own. Greer also tackles the December 21, 2012 belief head-on.

“Today’s believers in a 2012 apocalypse,” Greer writes, “have let themselves be drawn into buying the comforting fantasy that the world around them will suddenly and cataclysmically be replaced by a new world more to their liking. What will happen on the morning of December 22, 2012, when the sun rises as usual over a world that stubbornly refuses to follow the script and provide the believers with the Great Turning of their dreams?”

Greer uses terms like the “Great Disappointment,” and warns of “a public humiliation drastic enough to drive today’s New Age movement to the fringes of society for two or three generations. Equally, the prophets of the 2012 apocalypse might well simply find some new date further in the future and come up with a plausible reason why the new date makes more sense than the old.”

What’s in it for the believers right now is an “emotional payoff,” Greer says, that benefits the faithful whether or not the prophecy comes to pass.

“To true believers,” Greer explains, “whether their belief fixates on a religious doctrine or a secular one, the apocalypse meme promises a future in which they will be proved right and everyone who disagrees with them will be forced to admit the error of their ways; to the idealistic, the arrival of a world more perfect than human arrangements have ever been able to provide; to the frustrated, the resentful, and the angry, a settling of scores on a superhumanly grandiose scale. Like the magic jewel in a fairy tale that makes everyone think they are seeing whatever they most desire, the apocalypse meme promises all things to all people. The seductive promise of the apocalypse meme is precisely that it seems to offer a free ticket out of the troubles of everyday life.”

I’ve been very surprised to see some of the poll results that indicate that a fairly large percentage of Americans believe there is some truth to the 2012 predictions. The media hasn’t been as vocal as expected in their usual tendency to dismiss such “fringe” beliefs, as they typically are, for example, with the occasional UFO report that somehow makes national news. They have toned down the “giggle and sneer factor” a little, perhaps in deference to those same polls showing that at least a sense of expectancy about the 2012 date has established itself in the public mindset.

One would hope that that same section of the public would agree that there are more pressing matters worthy of their concern. In an age when humanity is threatened by real-world problems that more realistically spell our collective demise, still another round of doom-saying based on “messages” from extraterrestrials and a completely unverifiable interpretation of the Mayan calendar should definitely take a backseat for even the most credulous of believers.

We should obviously worry about the uneasy standoff between Israel and Iran, for example. With Iran still issuing death threats to Israel as a matter of everyday foreign policy, Israel seems equally determined to make a preemptive strike against whatever level of nuclear danger Iran secretly poses. Iran, while still infatuated with its newly developed nuclear toy, would be less hesitant than any other similarly-equipped sovereign state to actually press the buttons on a series of missiles. Their belief that they truly serve Allah by being murderous martyrs effectively smothers any sense of self-preservation on their part. It is always a good day to die for their religion.

I am reminded of Chapter 13 of the Book of Revelation, where it is prophesied that the False Prophet would bring down fire from heaven in the sight of men as part of the workings of the Antichrist. But you don’t have to be Bible-believing to see the danger of a nuclear show of force on Iran’s part and to feel the dread of what would come after.

Living as I do in Southern California, we deal with the threat of earthquakes every day. I’ll never forget when the Northridge earthquake of 1993 happened. I was prostrate on the floor beneath the desk with my computer with my whole apartment building shaking from side to side. Neither my family nor I suffered any injuries, but of course there were many who weren’t so lucky. The earth could at any time start to shift beneath our feet and swallow a good many of us up. I keep an “earthquake bag” full of canned food and extra toiletries in the event that the normal amenities are not available in the aftermath of an earthquake. Believe me, it is a more pressing concern than the date of December 21, 2012.

We are also in constant danger from solar flares, which could knock out our power and communication grids like swatting a fly. Solar radiation also beats down on us without letup, and skin cancer cases are on the rise. Asteroids and meteors could appear from nowhere and bear down on Earth without mercy. We know the dinosaurs are said to have died out from the impact of a cataclysmic asteroid and the same could quite easily happen to us. We as a more highly-evolved species with all of our technological finery would be just as vulnerable to mass extinction as the dinosaurs were. There would be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

Airborne viruses – some possibly originating off-planet – are another threat, a danger that has inspired many a suspense movie over the last 40 or 50 years. “The Andromeda Strain,” directed by Robert Wise, is but one example. The 1971 film deals with a small team of super-scientists trying to isolate a deadly strain of virus from outer space, racing against time and nuclear detonation. The same outer space we long to reach out to may instead reach back to us with fistfuls of death of destruction.

Meanwhile, we have numerous examples of earthbound plagues in our history. The Black Death of the Middle Ages and the Spanish flu epidemic of the early 20th century come to mind immediately. There is also the fact that new strains of some viruses have mutated and now possess a much higher tolerance for antibiotics than ever before. The same medication that would have fixed you right up is now up against a stronger biological foe than it can successfully overcome.

There is another danger to considered as well when it comes to the 2012 prophecy: What if some terrorist group chooses December 21 as the day to launch a massive attack of some kind? They may feel that they are the reason the date is considered important at all and that it is their destiny to fulfill the prophecies. They would be able to take complete advantage of the fear and confusion that would follow in the wake of their attack, since many of the frightened survivors might see the attack as an “Act of God,” something predestined to change the world order and to bring the terrorist beliefs to the forefront of world politics in a way never seen before.

The cumulative effect of all these negative scenarios should be enough to put you off prophecies like the 2012 prediction forever. When the long-awaited date comes and goes, perhaps the worries of that time will again take precedence and the doomsday fears of the masses will be a little more sharply focused on the real world of political ineptness and ecological self-destruction.

December 21, 2012, falls on a Friday, and one of my musical favorites, the jazz/rock band Steely Dan, had a popular song back in the 1970s called “Black Friday” in which part of the lyric goes: “When Black Friday comes/I’m going to dig myself a hole/I’m going to lay down in it until I satisfy my soul.”

Which seems as good a way as any to spend December 21. And it may even be the case that Steely Dan is the real prophet in terms of the much-anticipated date. When nothing “apocalyptic” happens, we’ll still be able to rock and roll in our personal holes and wait for Christmas with a lighter heart – in spite of the inevitable credit card bills from which no doomsday or sudden rapture can save us.

If you enjoyed this article, visit Sean Casteel’s UFO Journalist website at www.seancasteel.com to read more of his articles or purchase his books.

]]>http://www.openminds.tv/when-black-friday-comes-waiting-for-too-much-of-nothing/17650/feed1Friends and Well-Wishers Gather To Honor Pioneer In Alien Implant Researchhttp://www.openminds.tv/friends-and-well-wishers-gather-to-honor-pioneer-in-alien-implant-research-824/16562
http://www.openminds.tv/friends-and-well-wishers-gather-to-honor-pioneer-in-alien-implant-research-824/16562#commentsWed, 15 Aug 2012 15:16:48 +0000http://www.openminds.tv/?p=16562This article was a collaborative effort by Sean Casteel and John Weigle. Dr. Roger Leir is well known in Ufology as a pioneer in the study of alien implants, the mysterious little devices often left behind in the bodies of abductees after an encounter. Since sometime in the mid-1990s, Leir has conducted over a dozen ...

]]>This article was a collaborative effort by Sean Casteel and John Weigle.

Dr. Roger Leir is well known in Ufology as a pioneer in the study of alien implants, the mysterious little devices often left behind in the bodies of abductees after an encounter. Since sometime in the mid-1990s, Leir has conducted over a dozen surgeries to remove the tiny implants and then turned the devices over to various labs for further study.

Leir has recently been suffering from a debilitating case of shingles, which led to serious infections in his leg and foot, all of which were further complicated by diabetes. In order to help Leir pay his sizable medical bills, the Los Angeles chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) devoted a meeting on July 21, 2012, to pay tribute to Leir and his many years of dedicated work in the field. Another meeting with the same lineup of speakers was hosted the next day by the Orange County chapter of MUFON in Costa Mesa, California.

The LA meeting began with some words from Steve Murillo, the state section director for MUFON Los Angeles. He said that the LA chapter receives new UFO reports daily, and some days can bring in two reports, with the Burbank area being especially active. The situation had come to a point where “we’re almost too busy,” Murillo said. The reports are often of lights that move quickly and assume strange shapes. Even so, he estimated that only about five percent of all sightings are reported.

“It’s nice to know that the community comes together when someone needs help,” Murillo said, meaning the UFO community’s events for Leir. “We have guests from as far away as Florida.”

Murillo then introduced hypnotherapist Yvonne Smith, who has worked with alien abductees for 21 years alongside such famous names as the late Budd Hopkins, the late Harvard psychiatrist Dr. John Mack, Roger Leir himself and others.

Yvonne Smith (R) with Jordan Maxwell. (Credit: Sean Casteel)

At the meeting, she primarily discussed her friendship with Leir. They met at a 1992 gathering of the Ventura-Santa Barbara MUFON chapter in Thousand Oaks. Smith had formed the Close Encounters Resource Organization (CERO) and took six abductees to the Thousands Oaks meeting, where they shared their experiences. Smith began to work with Leir and his colleague, Alice Leavy, who was at the time the assistant director of the Ventura-Santa Barbara group, on a documentary with well-known author and abductee Whitley Strieber called “Alien Intent.” The film has since aired a few times on television.

Smith said she is currently working on a multiple-persons abduction case. “Honestly, they do happen,” she said. She discussed a case involving three 9-year-old boys who were camping in a field near their homes and remember seeing a bright object above them but no more. The case happened several years ago, but Smith had recently made contact with all three of the experiencers and is working with Leir and Mexican UFO investigator and TV personality Jaime Maussan to further investigate what happened.

Smith showed a film clip of Ron Noel, one of the abductees, who now remembers something being inserted into his left arm. In the clip, Noel said he remembers that the three were “floating like balloons” after seeing the light. They were taken to a “place” where he could see that the “ground’s going farther and farther away.” He realizes he’s in a room but can’t see much; he has a feeling it’s a “really, really big room.”

“I feel comfortable,” Noel said, when asked if it was hot or cold. “I see a silhouette.” He felt something clammy touching his arms. “I can’t do what I want. I’m being held against my will and I don’t like it.”
One of the beings said, “Don’t be afraid, child. We are here to help you.” They put something in his arm, Noel continued. It didn’t hurt and there was no blood. They told him not to worry.

The object was removed and analyzed by a team of experts that included Steve Colbern, another speaker at the Leir fundraiser. One of those who examined the implant said it was so hard that even diamond tools could not cut it and a high-powered laser was required to do the job. Yvonne Smith thanked Leir for putting his “life and reputation” on the line by going public with his work.

Jose Escamilla (Credit: Sean Casteel)

The next speaker was filmmaker Jose Escamilla, who discussed his most recent film, “Celestial,” about purported artificial structures on the moon, photos of which have, he said, been tampered with by NASA. Escamilla also stated that full color photos taken by the space probe Clementine in 1994 give the observer an entirely different impression of the moon than the more familiar black and white photos we’re used to.

Photos taken of the Lobachevsky crater reveal a triangular object and what looks like construction work by some unknown entity, he said. He said another photo shows an object he likened to a crashed spaceship. Escamilla believes that Japan, India and China are also covering up similar discoveries on the moon.

The aforementioned Steven Colbern, a nanotechnologist, discussed the results of the various implant analyses. Colbern has been working with Leir since 1998, and it has been “an incredible experience” for him.

Colbern said the implants are nanotech objects that function as nano-electronic devices. The nano-tubes inside the implants are thousands of times stronger that any material we have today and are “proof positive that someone is coming here.”

Generally, the implants have a metallic core and can be found with simple stud finders as a start. If the stud finder indicates there is something there, then additional tests are needed, to include X-rays, although implants don’t always show up on X-rays. A Gauss meter is also useful in detecting implants. Sometimes the implants emit radio frequencies, and it is assumed that they all have this capability.

Steven Colbern (Credit: Sean Casteel)

Many of the implants contain common metals but with unusual isotopic ratios. Carbon nano-tube structures and atypical nano-crystals are common. The inner metallic core is surrounded by a membrane, and nerve cells grow into the membrane to connect the devices to the subject’s nervous system. The implants don’t prompt a response from a person’s immune system and are, therefore, impervious to the body’s natural tendency to reject a foreign object.

One of the objects Dr. Leir removed transmitted at a frequency used by our satellites, making Colbern wonder if the aliens are sharing information with the military. It is difficult to conceive of a way to make the implants with today’s technology, he said. Meanwhile, abductee Ron Noel seemed to go into a state of depression when his implant was removed but he has since pulled out of it. It’s not clear what effects might develop from removing implants.

Jordan Maxell, an expert in Biblical and occult symbolism, was the next scheduled speaker, but because the program was running long, he was limited to introducing Whitley Strieber, the keynote speaker for evening. Maxwell said that Dr. Leir had helped so many people in the past and that all of the money collected at the door would go to help Leir with his medical expenses.

Then Strieber took the stage. He said he and Dr. Leir go back to 1996, and that Leir was “looking remarkably well tonight.” In 1985, Strieber began, he had a CE III that is still affecting him and his thoughts. Strieber was referring to the December 26 experience of that year that led him to discover his own abduction history and write the bestselling book Communion. He went on to describe an experience that took place on May 2, 1995, around 11:30 p.m. or midnight. He heard the crunching of gravel in the driveway of his cabin, he said. Over the years, he has “learned that nobody who calls you after midnight is someone you want to talk to,” so he turned on the outdoor lights. The cabin had extensive security because of his earlier experiences, and [since the 1985 experience] “I slept like a nervous dog.”

Strieber saw two people at the foot of his bed and heard a male voice say, “Condition red.” His first thought, he said, was about the shotgun underneath his bed. He next saw that there was a woman there, who appeared to be about 5 feet, 4-5 inches tall and aged 25-35 with thin lips and a grave expression. There was also a man with a long beard who appeared to be redheaded. He felt pressure in his ear, Strieber said. The woman was speaking gently. Hypnosis very quickly becomes difficult to use in such cases because it’s difficult to know what the mind is just filling in from previous knowledge, so he didn’t use it to try to learn more about this event. When the waves of pressure stopped, he continued, he jumped up, flipped on the lights and heard something running through the woods. The security system was on and armed, and he checked the house and found no doors or windows open. The system covered all possible entrances. He did not enter the garage, which proved to be significant later. “Was it a nightmare?” he wondered. “What the hell happened?”

When Strieber’s wife, Anne, awoke that morning, she said she hadn’t heard anything the night before. Strieber went to the garage to get his car and make his daily trip to pick up the newspaper at a store down the road from their cabin. He found the garage door wide open. It wasn’t possible, Strieber said, for the alarm system to still be armed and for the garage door to be open because opening the door would have set off the alarm. He backed up the car a few feet and felt so much static electricity that he jumped out, fearing an explosion.

Strieber phoned the person who had sold him the alarm system and asked him to check out the problem. He found a powerful magnetic field around alarm switch, Strieber said, that was all out of proportion to the magnets used on the doors. He finally replaced the magnets and everything was fine. That afternoon, Strieber’s left ear began to hurt, but there was no visible entry point, scar or blood. Still, he could feel something in the ear. About the same time, Strieber continued, he began to hear about a California doctor [Dr. Leir] who “had gone completely insane” because he had gone public about removing alien implants. He almost lost his license because of his work.

Strieber said that there is “extraordinary knowledge waiting for us to pick up and use” if we would study the implants with an open mind. Many are encased in skin, which is why they don’t trigger immune system reactions. But we know that skin cannot grow in deep muscle tissue, so it’s a mystery how an implant survives. If we could understand how this process works, “medical science could advance significantly.”

There is an enormous cultural bias against the study of abductions and the implants that are so often part of the experience. Even Leslie Kean, the bestselling author of UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, whose work is excellent, Strieber said, wouldn’t mention abductions. “This is something that is penetrating right into us,” Strieber said.

Whitley Strieber (Credit: Sean Casteel)

Returning to the subject of his 1995 implant, after a week or two his left ear began to turn bright red. He would hear a screeching sound and had a metallic taste in his mouth, which he now thinks could have been a fear reaction. At times, he thought about cutting his ear off altogether. Soon after, Strieber and Dr. Leir began to correspond. Leir’s primary concern is always the well-being of his patients and he refused to do some operations that a less careful doctor might have performed. Strieber decided at that point not to have the object removed. Later, after he and his wife had relocated to Texas, he decided to have a more local doctor try to remove the object, leaving Dr. Leir a bit miffed. The Texas doctor took X-rays, marked the site and made an incision. The doctor said the object looked like a white disc, and when he touched it, it moved. The doctor was only able to retrieve a small piece of the object and decided to terminate the procedure. The object at that point had moved to Strieber’s ear lobe. Two days later, the ear began to burn painfully and the implant moved back to its original location at the top of the ear.
The doctor told Strieber that the pathologist who examined the fragment said in a phone call that the piece of the implant was the strangest thing he had ever seen. Living cilia were attached to it. Strieber was left wondering if the object had moved for its own safety or for his. Strieber’s wife feels the implant should not be removed and is serving some useful purpose.

Still, Strieber had some good news for Dr. Leir. Dr. Bill Mallow, the chief of materials science at the Southwest Research Institute, contacted Strieber and asked about other implant reports. He called Leir and told him Mallow wanted to work with them, Strieber said. As a result, they had completely free and open access to millions of dollars worth of equipment.

Strieber and the others learned that the objects were of a metallic composition similar to some pieces that were sent to Art Bell when he was the regular host of “Coast To Coast AM” that were alleged to be part of the Roswell debris. One of the Bell pieces consisted of layers bismuth and magnesium with no apparent means holding them together. Another object Strieber and Leir’s team had analyzed was made from glass created in a rare industrial process and not likely to be picked up by anyone who wasn’t working in the factory where it was made. Another implant transmitted FM radio signals, while still another remained impervious to X-rays for a full 36 hours. The X-rays simply passed through it as though it wasn’t there.

There are numerous physical objects that can’t be explained, Strieber said. “This is knowledge lying on the ground, ready to be picked up and used. I find it outrageous that it’s not being seriously investigated.” Strieber went on to list some of the disappointments suffered along the way, such as offers of money and support that never came through. The Southwest Research Institute began to send back reports on blank paper, not risking using paper with its own letterheads. When Dr. Bill Mallow left his job at the Institute, the new director told the team that the CIA “took a dim view” of UFO research. There has been some excellent research by Steve Colbern, Strieber said, “but he won’t be published in peer-reviewed journals.”

In any case, Strieber said, Dr. Leir “is a true pioneer, a genuine pioneer of the first order.” When all this comes into focus, Dr. Leir should be someone students will read about in their history books.

In a Q and A session after his lecture, Strieber was asked if he feels the alien implants have had any effects on his health. “I’m not sure,” Strieber answered, “but for several years I’ve had nothing but some colds. I have seen no ill effects. My wife thinks I can do things with my ‘third eye’ because of the implant. My thought is that maybe when I’m 70 I’ll have it taken out.”

Dr. Roger Leir (Credit: Sean Casteel)

After a few more questions, Dr. Roger Leir himself came to the podium. “What I just heard this evening,” Leir said, “almost leaves me speechless and in a very emotional state. Thanks to the team that has helped our research and to those of you attending tonight. “The road for me has not been an easy one over the last several months,” Leir continued. He came down with shingles, the severity of which has increased considerably in the last several years. Now one in every six Americans is expected to come down with it. The chicken pox virus is being blamed for shingles, but they’re not really related, Leir said. It can attack all parts of the body, including the eyes. It’s a terrible disease, and he has become more and more debilitated. His spread to his foot with a serious infection.

Leir next spoke of a recent invitation he received from one of his patients to visit Yuma, Colorado, where he learned of cattle mutilations that dated back to the early 1900s, which negates the theory that the government is doing the mutilations to look for traces of radioactivity in livestock.

So for Dr. Roger Leir, his UFO research continues to be open to new discoveries and new ways of interpreting the data gleaned from his many implant removal surgeries. And the meetings hosted by the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters of MUFON demonstrate that the UFO community does indeed look out for its own and perhaps add a new shade of meaning to the saying, “We are not alone.”

To make a contribution for Dr. Roger Leir’s medical expenses, visit his website at www.alienscalpel.com. Or mail a check or money order directly to Leir at 625 Avenida De Los Arboles, Thousand Oaks, CA, 91360.

This is a guest post by Sean Casteel. The ideas, statements, and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Open Minds.

Whitley Strieber’s story is as complicated and enigmatic as the experiences he has so long grappled with and tried to convert into human language. It all started with the December 1985 encounter at his cabin in upstate New York, a nightmarish visitation that was the basis for his 1987 “New York Times” bestselling book, “Communion.” Strieber has more than once stated that he rues the day the book was published, as it has resulted in him going down a path that brings with it public humiliation and the mockery of both an unbelieving mainstream and even the UFO community itself.

Whitley Strieber with his book Solving the Communion Enigma. (credit: John Anthony Miller)

Nevertheless, he has written a new nonfiction book on his experiences, the first in many years, called “Solving The Communion Enigma” (Tarcher/Penguin, 2012), in which he reexamines his early encounters and juxtaposes them with the Big Picture, to include crop circles, animal mutilations and UFO sightings from around the world.

There are the usual locations and people present. The fondly recalled cabin in New York still plays a major role in his memories, though he was forced to sell it many years ago when post-“Communion” financial difficulties set in. Strieber’s devoted relationship with his wife Anne, who has played such a crucial a role in Strieber’s understanding of and coping with the bizarre turns his life has taken, is as always a prominent component of the stories he tells. It was Anne who sat and read the many thousands of letters from close encounter witnesses that the couple received after including a mailing address in the closing pages of “Communion.” If the experience was happening to so many people, how could it be a matter of Strieber hallucinating or suffering simple vivid dreams?

In the following interview, Strieber also speaks of encountering a man from “between the lives” who could manifest in Strieber’s home in both a physical body and as an awesome glowing presence. And then there are Strieber’s stories of the interaction of the dead with his mysterious visitors. There are numerous accounts of this phenomenon, some of which came from the aforementioned letters from readers, while other similar incidents happened to Strieber himself as well as to guests in his home. Strieber foresees a future time when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead will fall, and the dead will come to dwell among us in a physical form and become a normal part of everyday life. Like so much of what Strieber has to say about his experiences, the idea is both frightening and beautiful at the same time.

Q. People often have their own definitions of the word “spiritual” and “spirituality.” What do those words mean for you?

Strieber: Well, my life experience and my work are very much about the body. And I don’t see the soul and the body as being separate. I think that the meditation I have been practicing for now over 40 years has gradually enabled me to deepen sensation in such a way that I can feel more of the limits of the body, because the body starts in the deep physical and radiates into other spectra. It’s the radiant part in those other spectra that we are blind to. But long and patient work has enabled me to “feel” them. So I don’t see the difference. The body IS the spirit.

Q. Is the alien abduction experience a spiritual one to you? Do the aliens you’ve encountered fit within your definition of spiritual?

Strieber: It’s too simple a question in many respects. The experience ranges from the ferocious and the extraordinarily difficult to the sublime. And it lands everywhere in-between on the spectra. It simply isn’t enough to say “Was it a spiritual experience or a physical experience? A good experience or a bad experience?” It was actually more than everything, in terms of an experience.

Q. I know you’ve always refused to define your encounter experiences as either good or bad, black or white, etc. But do you feel that you and other abductees are dealing with entities that man has historically described as spirits?

Strieber: Man has described them as all sorts of things. We don’t have a very developed ability to talk about this. The languages that we have are not well-suited to describing either the experiences or what we encounter in them, because our languages emerged out of an attempt to communicate about the physical world around us. And things bleed off into areas that we don’t recognize because they don’t have the same boundaries as what we see as physical. So we have trouble describing them. So I can’t answer the question, really.

Q. It’s often said that the trauma of abduction eventually leads to a positive, cathartic transformation of the abductee, whether the aliens intend that to happen or not. In spite of how unpleasant abduction can be, has the experience nevertheless helped you to grow spiritually?

Strieber: What a person takes from this depends entirely on what they give to it. If they give fear, they will take anger and hatred. If they give curiosity, they make take what I got, which was years in a sort of school, of lessons, that were intended to display to me some notion of what was happening to me and what was going on and what the world around us really means. This got deeper and deeper and deeper over the years. It changed me profoundly. However, if after the initial experience, I had turned away from it and simply buried it in my mind and decided it must be some sort of a nightmare, nothing else would ever have happened.
When a close encounter experience occurs, a person can react to it in any number of different ways. Among them is a very negative reaction if the encounter is ferocious or difficult, as it can be. And my initial ones certainly were. You can put it out of your mind, which is something a lot of people do, in which case it probably won’t go any further. You can turn toward it, which is what I did. In some cases, such as mine, it went further and I ended up in a relationship with whatever’s out there for many years. That relationship enabled me to see things about our world that are almost entirely invisible to us. For one thing, I don’t think that any of the explanations that we have made for ourselves about how the unseen parts of reality work are actually true. I think that they’re all imaginary – all of our heavens, our hells, our gods, our angels, our demons – the whole thing is an attempt to understand an iceberg by looking at the few inches of surface that appears above the water and never realizing that beneath the waves there is something absolutely enormous.

Cover of Strieber's new book. (credit: Tarcher/Penguin)

Q. You say in the new book that the visitors and their seemingly paranormal abilities are woven into the patterns of everyday life. Can you expound on that a little here?

Strieber: Well, first of all, I’m not a believer in the paranormal or the supernatural. I don’t think they exist at all. I think the whole world is natural and there are simply parts of it we understand and parts of it we don’t. Two hundred years ago, a lot of people would have thought that radio proved the existence of ghosts or demons or whatever. To me, the word “paranormal” is simply meaningless. One of the things that has happened in the context of my experiences is that there have been certain instances in which the visitors have appeared to people in ordinary life, such as the editor from William Morrow and Company who encountered two of them in a bookstore reading “Communion.” And Timothy Greenfield Saunders, who came face-to-face with one of them on 14th Street in Manhattan on the day that Anne and I left New York forever. There’s also a case in England that I refer to in the book of a city councilman who saw an apparent alien walking down the street in the middle of his town with nobody else noticing. And there are many instances in the letters we received of encounters happening right in public places with nobody noticing. So it’s perfectly possible that this can happen. People see what they want to see, and they can be very easily controlled.

I know an interesting man, a science reporter named Ralph Steiner, who was driving down the street in Berkeley one day and saw to his amazement, very clearly, UFOs just overarching the sky, a whole group of them. He heard at the same time a voice in his head, “We’re just the U.S. Geologic Survey. This isn’t important.” He noticed no one else was reacting to their presence at all. He stopped his car and he looked and he thought back, “I know you’re not the U.S. Geologic Survey.” He was given a date and time when he could return. He did come back at that time, and there they were again.

Another case involves a psychologist who was driving down the Brooklyn-Queens expressway near LaGuardia Airport in New York, and he suddenly saw what looked like an enormous airplane coming low over the highway, like it was going to land on the highway. And he thought, My God, there’s a jet off-course. Then, as it passed overhead, it looked more like something fake, like it wasn’t really a jet. It looked like a “fake” jet. He was just stunned by what he was seeing. Everybody else was going along the road, but he realized this thing was fake. And as soon as he realized that, he saw something going on on the roadside. There was a big lighted thing like a billboard with these strange symbols racing across it. And there were cars pulling up on the roadside and people getting out of the cars and walking up on to the shoulder of the road, which was quite wide and dark at that point. So he pulled up and he got out. He was walking with the other people toward the shoulder and suddenly a group of small figures – which he described as almost clown-like figures, very short, about three or four feet tall – surrounded him. One of them said to him, in a terribly menacing voice, “This isn’t for you. Get out of here.” It scared him half to death. He got in his car and drove away. Now, to me, what this means is this has penetrated deeply into our world. And IT controls who sees it and who doesn’t and who goes where and who doesn’t.

This is part of us. We are part of it. It’s not an alien invasion at all. It is part of the human experience and when we are looking at the so-called aliens, we are looking at an aspect of the human experience also.

Q. Do you think we’ll reach a point where we’ve learned everything and simply can’t go any further? You say this may have happened to the visitors themselves at one point in their evolutionary development, resulting in them going a bit mad from being trapped in a final version of reality forever.

Strieber: The experience I had was this: I had contact with some of the visitors out in the woods at night sometimes. It was very brief and ephemeral. But nevertheless, sometimes I could have an interaction. And what the interaction would consist of would be of me either speaking out loud or thinking a question. There would generally be an answer in the form of vivid imagery in my mind. At this time I believe I spoke the question, about what the universe meant to them. The answer was very immediate. It was a picture of a coffin. And it shocked me, because of course I expected some sort of wonder, but instead, this coffin. I was shocked to my core because I thought what despair must be involved. This is an extremely complicated experience, so to assume that just because one reacted this way, it doesn’t mean that everything that’s out there would react the same way.

But then I thought to myself, what if they’re here to experience our “unsureness,” and that they’ve learned so much about the universe that it is like plying the infinite and finding endless sameness that you can’t ever escape. But then, when they are directing themselves toward us, they are reliving the wonder of childhood. And if that’s true, then they would have a huge motive for preventing us from learning everything because then we would be like them and therefore useless to them. We might be a kind of an extraordinary refuge against the madness that threatens when you find that you know everything but cannot escape.

Q. Is there still a possibility of us being colonized and exploited by the visitors?

Q. How do you see the whole Disclosure movement? I know you don’t always think that complete government disclosure would necessarily be a good thing, right?

Strieber: Well, I don’t think that governmental disclosure is going to be particularly useful because I don’t think they really know what’s going on. A bunch of military people have tried to understand this in the terms of modern military thinking? Come on, it’s just ridiculous. It’s absurd. The idea that they may have some clear, useful knowledge to me is laughable. However, if that were to happen, if there were to be disclosure, if the government were to admit that there were intelligently-guided craft here, then it would also have to explain what the abductions were, and I don’t think it can do that because I don’t think it knows. It would have to explain what the visitors are, and I don’t think it has a correct answer to that.

The experience is so chimerical and difficult to pin down. The government and the military probably have answers that are very fear-based and based in the fundamental illogic of the assumption that the physical and spiritual worlds are two different things. Those answers are likely to be completely wrong. But I think that the public would take them as gospel truth, because they came from the insiders, the in-the-know people in the government, if there are any. That would be very unfortunate. It would be very misleading. So I would be saddened to see whatever ideas they’ve come up with or conclusions they’ve drawn suddenly become public knowledge before the actual reality was really apprehended or understood at all by the general public.

Because it would take us down the same pointless, empty path that they’ve gone down. I think they’ve gone down a path that is quite useless. I don’t think they know a thing about what’s actually going on. My impression from the ones I’ve met over the years was that they were not the best minds I ever met, number one. And number two, they were looking at it as an “us-versus-them” military confrontation.

Frank Feschino, in his book “Shoot Them Down,” chronicles numerous cases of governmental attempts to shoot down UFOs. Milton Torres gave interviews in 2009 and 2010 regarding a Ministry of Defence report that was released in 2009 detailing the fact that the U.S. Air Force, when Milton Torres was a pilot in 1957, ordered him to attempt to shoot down a large UFO, along with a couple of other pilots. When they began to go through their firing sequence to fire at it, it disappeared. Torres said it was the size of an aircraft carrier. There were attempts to debunk this by saying it was some kind of a false radar return being used in an experimental program to create radar deceptions, but that program didn’t come into being until years later. So probably Torres, or then Captain Torres, was ordered to shoot down a UFO.

As recently as the Stephenville UFO incident in 2008, Stephenville, Texas, MUFON investigators, after a Freedom of Information Act request, received radar returns that indicated that exactly what had been seen from the ground by witnesses in fact happened. That is to say, witnesses saw UFOs moving overhead and being chased by military aircraft, and the radar returns showed that despite the false statements made by Carswell Air Force Base officers, in fact Carswell planes were detailed to chase these UFOs and did so. It’s all on radar, the whole thing. So this kind of response, anyone who is responding to this presence in this way is wrong about it, is completely mistaken about it, is taking it in the most simplistic possible way. It’s a bit like a dog barking at a jet. It’s just a meaningless response. Or innocent little tribesmen from some lost tribe shaking their spears at airplanes. It’s ridiculous. And if the government response is as ridiculous on that level, then we certainly don’t want them leading us down this same silly path in the context of some sort of Disclosure. So no, I’m not in favor of disclosure because I don’t think they’re doing it right. I don’t think they know what they’re doing and I don’t want that to become gospel, and it will become gospel if it becomes public.

Q. The close encounter experience sometimes also includes the appearance of deceased friends and family, which implies that the visitors can cross between our world and the world of the dead. Can you discuss that further here?

Strieber: I have been thinking a lot about that, because there can be no question that this is true. It has appeared in so many of the letters that we’ve received, in my own life, and in experiences that groups of people have had in our cabin in upstate New York. So it is true. When I had my first close encounter, there was a man there who I knew. And I was astonished to find a few weeks after the experience, the December of 1985 experience, that he’d been dead since the previous March. The reason I initially thought that I was the victim of some kind of criminal activity, being assaulted and drugged and so forth, was that he was there. He had been a Central Intelligence Agency agent and I was just suspicious that something was up. I didn’t know quite what it would be, but I was very suspicious. Then I was amazed to find that he was dead. I’d even seen his grave. He’s certainly dead.

We used to have people in groups up to our cabin and we found that they often would see the dead in the context of the visitors. Two people sleeping in the bed in the basement woke up to find a dead friend standing at the foot of the bed. In the letters we’ve received, it’s absolutely commonplace. So I’ve discarded the idea that this is “scientists from another planet” coming here to study us. It’s something else. I think that what it represents in part – and it’s very complicated – is mankind’s next step, our movement to another level of being in which what we call the dead will not be so mysterious. They will be part of life in a certain way. I think that the visitors bring with them – and understand, I don’t say that I think they’re not aliens. I don’t know what they are. But they bring with them a dropping of the veil between the living and the dead.

Q. You were saying that the dead may even come to dwell among us.

Strieber: Well, I don’t know why they wouldn’t be. I have had in my experience a relationship with someone I regarded – and who identified himself – as dead. The relationship lasted for three years. He had a limited ability to manifest a physical presence. When he was physical he was very small and very light, but definitely human-feeling and looking. The very last time that I would ever see him at that cabin in upstate New York, he manifested as a glowing light and it was absolutely awesome. He indicated to me during the course of our relationship that he was from “between the lives,” that he would eventually one day be in the physical again. Interestingly enough, his primary concern, when he first showed up in my life, was the degree of my loyalty to my wife. And that was tested.

The other thing that happened first, before he proceeded, was a life review where he went through my life with me and did it in my mind in pictures. Incident after incident after incident of my life, looking for where my conscience resided. Once I seemed to have passed these tests, then the relationship grew.

Q. During the “Scole Experiment” to demonstrate the reality of an afterlife that was carried out in around 1999/2000 in the UK, many photographs and other images were obtained. One of these was of an entity that is absolutely identical to the traditional “gray” often seen in ET encounters.

Strieber: The image that appeared in the Scole Experiment was very interesting to me because I think that whatever is here has come into contact with that level of human being first, that they are already well-involved with what we call the dead and are just now beginning to penetrate deeper into the body of the species, into the more dense areas, which is where we are, the living. The more dense physical area. And I’m not so sure that they have the ability to completely express themselves in this physical realm. I suspect that part of their interest in us might be that we have these two very distinct levels of being. We’re like the caterpillars and the dead are the butterflies. But I wouldn’t say, for example, that the dead are a supernatural element at all. I think they’re part of the physical world but a part of it that we don’t understand or know how to address yet.

So I found that picture very interesting and very supportive of what our findings are.

Q. Can you talk about the gargantuan spiders incident mentioned in the new book?

Strieber: The first night that this man that I have meditated with for so long appeared in my life, he came into my meditation room and stood there. I couldn’t see him, but I felt his presence so strongly. I was very sensitized to that because I could often feel the presence of the grays when they were around me, and also smell an odor of something hot. In other words, I could tell that the grays were present and I was immediately aware of this man’s presence in the room. He was right in front of me and I couldn’t see him. I finally said aloud, “Look, I can’t meditate here with you there, and I know perfectly well you’re here. You’re going to have to show me yourself, and if you don’t, I’m leaving.” Nothing happened, so I left the room. Later that night, I was awakened the way the grays used to wake me up, by punching me on the shoulder. And there he was. He went down and sat on the foot of the bed, very, very still, as if if he moved even slightly he would simply disappear from the face of the earth and from my eyes. I touched him, and he was there. He felt and smelled physical. I woke up a second time, and there were these enormous spiders on the ceiling. This was after there had been a certain examination of me, about my relationship with my wife, which has been very strong.

And they were hanging over the bed. They were absolutely enormous. Horrible. Ten times the size of the largest spider you’ve ever seen. And not only that, the one that was over Anne was scrabbling against the ceiling and having trouble hanging on. This thing had a great black abdomen covered with yellow stripes. It looked like an insectoid tiger. It was horrible. I leaped out of bed and by that time I was fully awake and I thought, Oh, God, what a nightmare. Then I looked and they were still there. I was horrified, because by that time I had had so many close encounter experiences and so many other people at the cabin had had them, I wasn’t in the least surprised. Anything could have happened and I would have believed it implicitly. So I no longer thought this was a dream.

I wanted to run like hell. Then I saw her lying there under that thing. It was struggling to stay where it was. It would fall on her. And her preciousness to me filled me completely. I went around there and I leaned over very carefully to gently wake her up and get her out from under that thing without her seeing it. Because I knew if she saw it, that would be it. She’d be totally panicked. I was waking her up and she made a very pleasant sound like she was being held in the night and enjoying that. Then I realized the spiders were gone. So I did hold her. I cuddled with her for the rest of the night.

And after that, the relationship with the man went on. It was as if he had to be sure that I was really, truly true to my honor and my love before he would come into any deeper contact with me.

Q. Do you see the worldwide visitor presence as building up to some grand spiritual revelation or a new level of understanding for mankind as a whole? Are we being led to a collective spiritual awakening?

Strieber: Well, I don’t think we’re being “led” anywhere. We may be going somewhere on our own and they may be here sort of as “midwives” watching us. It seems to be possible that there will be some kind of a moment of “critical mass” and what I would think would happen then would be that the veil between the living and the dead would drop, and we would immediately gain a completely new perspective on the experience of being. That would be my guess. And I think that could happen. I don’t know when or where or if, but it seems like a possibility. There is certainly the sense that it is all leading somewhere, and perhaps that would be where. But certainly it’s not leading to a flying saucer landing on the White House lawn. That would surprise me very much. That would mean that in a way it had led in the wrong direction, because unless it leads us to greater being, why even do it? Our mystery must be served. And the relationship, if it’s going to be a rich relationship, between us and them, whatever they are, has to come from the richest place that we possess. If the dead are real and the living are real, and there could be a meeting between the two, then the species as a whole would be far, far richer, unimaginably richer than it is now. And very, very worth a relationship with. I think it would be the most difficult, surprising, exciting and extraordinary thing that could possibly happen. Frankly, I hope something like that does happen. It will be as scary as it can be, I’m sure. But we’re surprisingly much more versatile than we imagine. You know, they always say that, well, the cockroaches lasted for 200 million years and have lasted through every mass extinction. Well, we’ve lasted now through a couple of mass extinctions, and I have a feeling we’re going to be here for the long pull, too. There will always be somebody who gets through, no matter what happens. We don’t look like cockroaches but we’re along that same line when it comes to survival.